Entropy, Free Lunches and Coercion
Entropy is generally a poorly understood concept, especially because it means something very specific and technical in Physics and Chemistry. But at the high-level, it’s really not that complicated....
View ArticlePatterns of Matter
Nothing is clean. Nothing is new. Everything is composed of subatomic particles that are nearly 14 billions years old. Your new car? Every single piece of it forged in a supernova, then flung into...
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Feedback
The 2nd law of thermodynamics is a crazy thing to fathom. It can be stated about a thousand different ways, like “No process is possible whose sole result is the transfer of heat from a body of lower...
View ArticleSocietal Collapse as a Memetic Extinction Event
Understanding complex systems is all about finding the right perspective. Things are often complicated by our intuition. We tend to see the world through our own eyes, on the scale of individual...
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Picturing Complex Systems
I’ve been thinking a lot about a mental image for complex systems that I first mentioned in Tropical Storms and Feedback Loops: the torus. It’s been really helpful for me to have this picture to wrap...
View ArticleModel Error
This is one of the biggest lessons I learned from Antifragile by Nassim Taleb: any time you model for a risk, your model has some unknown errors (because you don’t perfectly understand the universe)....
View ArticleThe Emergence of Complexity [Video]
I didn’t say it quite right in the video. When I’m talking about variations in density, I mean variations in the density of entropy, not matter itself (although those are probably deeply related). So...
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